HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 27 — To those who ask how long President Robert G. Mugabe can remain in control of Zimbabwe, given its wildfire inflation, the growing desperation of average people and the opposition’s increasingly open hatred of the government, a former member of that government has an answer: longer than one might think.
“He will not go,” said the former official, who was once a loyal lieutenant in Parliament and remains a member of Mr. Mugabe’s ruling party. “Everyone wants him to go. In the party everyone wants him to be gone. But who will stand against him? He is too powerful.
“You put my name in your newspaper and I am dead. That is how powerful he is.”
There is a potent whiff of Potemkin in Zimbabwe now. Mr. Mugabe, the nation’s only leader since white rule ended 27 years ago, boasts that he has crushed his critics and will ride popular adulation to a new term as president next year.
But his bravado is belied by everyday scenes here: the 13 Chinese-made water cannons that encircled the soccer match on Sunday between Zimbabwe and Morocco, poised to put down rioting; the warnings on state radio to “leave politics to the politicians”; the crackdown in urban slums, where the police break up gatherings of more than four or five people and arrest anyone who is spotted carrying gasoline, apparently fearing that it may be used in firebombs.
Among political analysts and dissidents alike, Mr. Mugabe’s situation is reduced to a single buzzword: endgame.
He presides over a nation crushed by inflation of about 1,700 percent a year. People revile him, his party grasps for a way to force him from office, and even his southern African neighbors, long his enablers, are meeting with him in Tanzania this week, hoping to ease him into retirement, many analysts say.
Yet it is unclear how easily anyone could pry loose Mr. Mugabe’s grip on power.
In interviews here, politicians aligned with the government, opposition leaders, an army deserter and a former police official all described a rising tide of unhappiness in the political and security organs that sustain his rule.
Many acknowledged the possibility of his departure, but none said the opposition or elements of Mr. Mugabe’s own government had the will or ability to topple him — at least for now.
The governing bodies of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front are expected to endorse Mr. Mugabe’s bid to run again for president at meetings on Friday, despite deep dissatisfaction with his rule. Nor do the police and military appear to be abandoning him, even though conditions are so bad that soldiers must buy light bulbs for their own barracks.
“Most of the police I interact with, they hate the government,” said the former police official, who recently left his post. “But they will carry out orders, most of them. I think the police are loyal.”
The source of the president’s longevity is no secret. The former police official and others described a system of perquisites that keeps government officials and political allies personally beholden to Mr. Mugabe, and an arsenal of threats and reprisals that keeps potential dissenters from acting on their desires.
Mr. Mugabe long ago won the loyalty of a powerful force — the guerrillas who fought in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s — by granting them huge pension bonuses and, in 2000, allowing them to seize the nation’s best farmland from white commercial farmers.
Since then, the veterans have become a rogue force in Zimbabwean politics, staging raids on the homes of opponents and beating and intimidating them, according to human rights groups and critics of the government.
But the land seizures served another purpose as well. Countless officials in the government, Parliament, the judiciary, the military and the police have been given their own farms as a reward for their loyalty — and stand to lose their land should they stray.
The village headmen and other traditional leaders in Zimbabwe’s rural areas have vehicles, courtesy of the government. So do all ranking police and military officers. Crossing Mr. Mugabe would mean the loss of those and other perks.
One 23-year-old Zimbabwean fled last year with nine other conscripts from Unit 21, an army barracks in Mutoka, about 90 miles outside Harare. “I decided to quit because of the situation — money, transport costs, working conditions,” he said.
“There was a shortage of food, even of mealie meal,” the ground corn that is Zimbabwe’s food staple, he said. “But the top officer,” a lieutenant general, “has kids. They don’t pay school fees. He has a car. He has free fuel. He has a farm. And sometimes, when we didn’t have anything to do, we were taken to his farm to do work. I did plowing.”
Such grievances, combined with miserable pay, have pushed military desertions and police resignations to record levels, people in all camps here said. But, they said, new recruits are not disaffected and, in a nation where 8 in 10 workers are jobless, are desperate to hold on to even a meager paycheck.
Two weeks ago, police officers rounded up scores of opposition protesters who sought to hold a banned meeting and beat them severely, sending many to hospitals. For their work, the former police official said, the officers were paid bonuses of 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars a day, or about $5.
[This week, the police detained Morgan Tsvangirai, a prominent opposition leader, yet again; he was released on Thursday.]
Virtually every Zimbabwean interviewed suggested that Mr. Mugabe’s authority might in fact be a fiction that would fold in the face of a real public challenge or a revolt within his party. The police and the military would not flinch at gunning down 200 demonstrators if ordered, they said; shooting at 10,000 might be another matter.
“Maybe if people demonstrate for real, showing that they are angry, the soldiers will have a chance to turn against the government,” the army deserter said, echoing others. “But people fear too much.”
So do the rank and file of Mr. Mugabe’s ruling party. “He has files on everyone,” the former member of Parliament said, “and if anyone expresses dissent, those files come out. ‘You did this, or you did that,’ and you are ruined — just like that.” He chuckled. “Maybe something unnatural will happen,” he said. “Maybe a bomb will fall from the sky.”
